World War II
World War II, also WWII, or the Second World War, was a global military conflict that took place between 1939 and 1945. It was the largest and deadliest war in history. Even though Japan had been fighting in China since 1937, the conventional view is that the war began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Within two days the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany, although the only European battles remained in Poland. Pursuant to a then secret provision of its non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union, The Allies were initially made up of Poland, the British Empire, France, and others. In May, 1940 Germany invaded western Europe. Six weeks later, France surrendered to Germany. Three months after that, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a mutual defense agreement, the Tripartite Pact, and were known as the Axis Powers. Then, nine months later, in June 1941, while still battling Britain, Germany betrayed and invaded its partner, the Soviet Union, forcing the Soviets into the Allied camp (although they still abided by their non-aggression treaty with Japan). In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States bringing it too into the war on the Allied side. China also joined the Allies, as eventually did most of the rest of the world. By the beginning of 1942, the major combatants were aligned as follows: the British Commonwealth, the United States, and the Soviet Union were fighting Germany and Italy; and the British Commonwealth, China, and the United States were fighting Japan. From then through August 1945, battles raged across all of Europe, in the North Atlantic Ocean, across North Africa, throughout Southeast Asia, throughout China, across the Pacific Ocean and in the air over Japan. Italy surrendered in September 1943, Germany in May 1945. The surrender of Japan marked the end of the war, on September 2, 1945. It is possible that around 62 million people died in the war; estimates vary greatly. About 60% of all casualties were civilians, who died as a result of disease, starvation, genocide, and aerial bombing. The former Soviet Union and China suffered the most casualties. Estimates place deaths in the Soviet Union at around 23 million, while China suffered about 10 million. Poland suffered the most deaths in proportion to its population of any country, losing approximately 5.6 million out of a pre-war population of 34.8 million (16%). After World War II, Europe was informally split into western and Soviet spheres of influence. Western Europe later aligned as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact. There was a shift in power from Western Europe and the British Empire to the two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. These two rivals would later face off in the Cold War. In Asia, the United States's military occupation of Japan led to Japan's democratization. China's civil war continued through and after the war, resulting eventually in the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The former colonies of the European powers began their road to independence. Causes Commonly held general causes for WWII are the rise of nationalism, the rise of militarism, and the presence of unresolved territorial issues. In Germany, resentment of the harsh Treaty of Versailles, specifically article 231 (the "Guilt Clause"); the belief in the Dolchstosslegende; and the onset of the Great Depression fueled the rise to power of Adolf Hitler's militarist National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazi Party). Meanwhile the treaty's provisions were laxly enforced, due to the fear of another war. Closely related is the failure of the British and French policy of appeasement, which sought to avoid war but actually gave Hitler time to re-arm. The League of Nations also failed in its mission of preventing war. Japan in the 1930s was ruled by a militarist clique devoted to Japan's becoming a world power. Japan invaded China to bolster its meager stock of natural resources. This angered the United States, which reacted by making loans to China, providing covert military assistance, and instituting increasingly broad embargoes of raw materials against Japan. These embargoes would have eventually wrecked Japan's economy; Japan was faced with the choice of withdrawing from China or going to war in order to conquer the oil resources of the Dutch East Indies. It chose to go ahead with plans for the Greater East Asia War in the Pacific. Aftermath Europe in ruins At the end of the war, millions of refugees were homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and 70% of the European industrial infrastructure was destroyed. Partitioning of Germany and Austria Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation. An Allied Control Council was created to co-ordinate the zones. The original divide of Germany was between America, Soviet Union and Britain. Stalin agreed to give France a zone but it had to come from the American or British zones and not the Soviet zone. The American, British, and French zones joined in 1949 as the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. Austria was once again separated from Germany and it, too, was divided into four zones of occupation, which eventually reunited and became the Republic of Austria. Reparations Germany paid reparations to France, Britain and Russia, in the form of dismantled factories, forced labour, and shipments of coal. The U.S. settled for confiscating German patents and German owned property in the U.S., mainly subsidiaries of German companies. In accordance with the Paris Peace Treaties, 1947, payment of war reparations was assessed from the countries of Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland. Morgenthau Plan The initial occupation plans proposed by the United States were harsh. The Morgenthau Plan of 1944 called for dividing Germany into two independent nations and stripping her of the industrial resources required for war. All heavy industry was to be dismantled or destroyed, the main industrial areas (Upper Silesia, Saar, Ruhr, and the German speaking parts of Alsace-Lorraine), were to be annexed. While the Morgenthau Plan itself was never implemented per se, its general economic philosophy did end up greatly influencing events. Most notable were the toned-down offshoots, including the Potsdam Conference, Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 (April 1945 - July 1947), and the industrial plans for Germany. Marshall Plan Germany had long been the industrial giant of Europe, and its poverty held back the general European recovery. The continued scarcity in Germany also led to considerable expenses for the occupying powers, which were obligated to try and make up the most important shortfalls. In view of the continued poverty and famine in Europe, and with the onset of the Cold War, a change of policy was required. The most notable example of this change was a plan established by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, the "European Recovery Program", better known as the Marshall Plan, which called for the U.S. Congress to allocate billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Europe. Also as part of the effort to rebuild global capitalism and spur post-war reconstruction, the Bretton Woods system was put into effect after the war. Border revisions and population shifts As a result of the new borders drawn by the victorious nations, large populations suddenly found themselves in hostile territory. The main benefactor of these border revisions was the Soviet Union, which expanded its borders at the expense of Germany, Finland, Poland and Japan. Poland was compensated for its losses to the Soviet Union by receiving most of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, including the industrial regions of Silesia. The German state of the Saar was temporarily a protectorate of France but it later returned to German administration. The number of Germans expelled totaled roughly 15 million, including 11 million from Germany proper and 3,500,000 from the Sudetenland. Germany officially states that 2,100,000 of these expelled lost their lives due to violence on the part of the Russians, Polish and Czech, though Polish and Czech historians dispute this figure.